There are those who believe that life is a sexually transmitted disease. I wouldn’t go that far, but it is relentless. It’s Monday. Again. I signed with a second publishing house this past week. I’ll be working on a book entitled Bedside Stories of Bad Girls from the Mid West for FarCountry Press. The territory I’ll be covering are South and North Dakota, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, etc.. I’m thrilled to be working with a second company. I’ll be traveling to D.C. this week to speak to a couple of politicians about my brother. The quest to get him teeth goes on. It might not have taken this long had it not been for the fact that my ex sister-in law had taken my brother’s dental records. She did that AFTER she remarried. There are laws set in place to keep a person from doing such a thing, but in Missouri the true law breakers go unpunished. My brother’s dental office looked the other way while she took the files. They offer no excuse for their actions -they simple let it happen. They were kind enough to give me the paperwork that shows that the records were removed from the office by a woman my brother wasn’t married to however. I wonder what she did with the medical records? I also wonder where she gets shoes to fit over her cloven hooves, but the Prince of Darkness surely has a plan to clothe his dominions. I hope the politicians I meet with about this situation hear me and actually do something. I should hear news about the baseball movie and the western this week. It would be nice to see some forward movement on those two fronts. Making a motion picture is a lengthy process. It’s so easy to feel a twinge of envy for the Hollywood executives. They have everything?and so much of it. Libbie Custer will keep me busy through all the waiting today. She is one of the most fascinating women I’ve ever spent time with. Onward and upward?I hope.

Over the years the women in my Thursday night Bible study have become essential to my ability to get up and go on the next day. They’ve listened to the horror stories about my brother, reserving any judgment. They cried with me, laughed with me, and prayed with me. We’ve been there for one another and it is because of them that I recall one of my favorite stories this morning. Nothing I could write could express the need I have for this group of women better than Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy once wrote a brief allegory in which an Angel disguised as a man is sent to earth by God to learn these three lessons: what is given to men, what is not given to men, and what men live by. At the conclusion of the story, the Angel reveals his identity to the poor shoemaker who had taken him in, and speaks of the lessons he has learned. So, Mr. Tolstoy, if you don’t mind?. “The clothes fell off the body of the Angel, and he was clothed with light so that no eye could bear to look upon him, and he began to speak more terribly, as if his voice did not come from him, but from Heaven. And the Angel said: “I learned that man does not live by care for himself, but by love for others. It was not given the mother to know what was needful for the life of her children; it was not given to the rich man to know what was needful for himself; and it is not given to any man to know whether by the evening he will want boots for his living body or slippers for his corpse. When I came to earth as a man, I lived not by care for myself, buy by the love that was in the heart of a passerby, and his wife, and because they were kind and merciful to me. The orphans lived not by any care they had for themselves; they lived through the love that was in the heart of a stranger, a woman who was kind and merciful to them. And all men live, not be reason of any care they have for themselves, but by the love for them that is in other people. I knew before that God gives life to men, and desires them to live; but now I know far more. I know that God does not desire men to live apart from each other, and therefore has not revealed to them what is needful for each of them to live by himself. He wishes them to live together united, and therefore has revealed to them that they are needful to each other’s happiness.”